The filmmaker Bruce LaBruce has been making scrappy, bratty, intermittently hilarious and generally haphazard low-budget movies since the early 1990s, most of which have a sarcastic political edge and all of which feature really hot guys getting it on with pornographic gusto.

Once more straddling the line between art and smut, the underground and the indie scene, his latest, “Otto; Or, Up With Dead People,” unfolds in and around the radical gay zombie culture of Berlin. Having developed a modicum of reason, the living dead are wearily accepted in society at large, despite the growing “plague” of homosexual undead, whose twin tastes for cannibalism and sodomy lend Mr. LaBruce a characteristically irreverent means of riffing on AIDS and the fear of gay recruitment.

Enter Otto (Jey Crisfar), a melancholy young zombie who shuffles about in a lovesick stupor. He is enlisted by a pretentious avant-garde filmmaker named Medea (Katharina Klewinghaus) to participate in her magnum opus, a “dissertation on the undead” involving revolutionary Marxism and gay orgies.

One of the more disciplined entries in the LaBruce oeuvre, “Otto” is sexy and silly in just the right proportions, a cult item with a real heart — albeit one that tends to get torn from the rib cage and munched on by naked men conversant in the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse.

OTTO; OR, UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Written and directed by Bruce LaBruce; director of photography, James Carman; edited by Jörn Hartmann; art director, Stefan Dickfeld; produced by Jürgen Brüning, Mr. LaBruce, Mr. Hartmann, Jennifer Jonas and Michael Huber; released by Strand Releasing. In Manhattan at the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. This film is not rated.